*
Jessie heard the crash. She looked over in its direction and instantly saw light inside the camper. She hurried further away towards the silo she had seen, fumbling her way, tripping over something, then banging her head into a sharp protruding object. She stifled a groan. Then carried on, feeling with her hands in the darkness until they reached an upright steel stanchion.
One of the pillars supporting the silo?
She crept forward, feeling the downward curve of the base of the silo, and crawled under it, then, still inching her way with her hands, she stood up, breathing in a dry dusty smell. Then she touched something that felt like the rung of a ladder.
*
He carried on searching with the torch, frantically opening each of the drawers. In the last one he found a bunch of tools. Among them was a big, heavy spanner. He picked it up, feeling the pain in his eye worsening with every second, feeling the blood streaming down his face. He retrieved the binoculars and moved to the door, staring out through them.
The bitch had vanished.
He didn’t care. He would find her. He knew the whole of this cement works like the back of his hand. He’d supervised the installation of all the surveillance cameras in here. This building housed the giant kilns that heated the combined limestone, clay, sand and bottom ash to 1,500 degrees Celsius, then fed it into twin giant cooling turbines, forward to the grinding mills and, when processed, into a series of storage silos to feed into waiting empty goods trucks. If the bitch wanted to hide, there were plenty of places.
But there was only one exit.
And he had the keys to the padlock in his pocket.
111
Sunday 18 January
Roy Grace delayed the Sunday evening briefing to 7.30 p.m., to give him time to report on the findings from the exhumation.
He left Glenn Branson in the mortuary, to cover any new developments that might occur, as the post-mortem was still not completed and was not likely to be for some while yet. The corpse had a broken jawbone and fractured skull, and it was the blow to the skull that had almost certainly killed her.
His best hopes, both of identifying the dead woman and of achieving his aim in having this exhumation, lay in the hair follicles and skin samples taken from the corpse, along with the condom which contained, in the views of Nadiuska De Sancha and Joan Major, what might be intact traces of semen. The forensic archaeologist thought that although it was twelve years old there was a good chance of DNA being extracted intact from that.
These items had been couriered in an icebox to the DNA laboratory he favoured for fast turnarounds and with whom he had a good working relationship, Orchid Cellmark Forensics. They had promised to start work the moment the items arrived. But there was a slow sequencing process and even if the lab worked around the clock, the earliest they could expect any results would be mid-afternoon tomorrow, Monday. Grace was assured he would be notified instantly by phone.
He took his place and addressed his team, bringing them up to date, then asked for progress reports.
Bella Moy went first, handing out photographs of a young woman with wild hair. ‘Sir, this is a photograph up in Brighton nick of one of the wanted persons in the city. Her current name – she’s used several aliases – is Donna Aspinall. She’s a known user, with a string of previous for fare dodging, both on trains and in taxis. She’s got an ASBO and she’s currently wanted on three separate counts of violent assault, GBH and actual assault. She’s been identified by two covert officers in the operation last night – one of whom she bit on the arm – as the person John Kerridge, the taxi driver, was chasing.’
Grace stared at the photograph, realizing the implication. ‘You’re saying that Kerridge is telling the truth?’
‘This would imply that he might be telling the truth about this passenger, sir.’
He thought for a moment. Kerridge had now been held for twenty-four hours. The maximum period for detaining a suspect without charge and without obtaining a court extension was thirty-six hours. They would have to release the taxi driver at 9.30 tomorrow, unless they had enough reason to convince a magistrate to hold him longer. They didn’t yet have evidence that Jessie Sheldon’s disappearance was the work of the Shoe Man. But if Kerridge’s solicitor, Acott, got hold of this – and he undoubtedly would and probably already had – they’d have a fight on their hands to get an extension. He needed to think about this, and getting an emergency magistrates’ court appearance tonight to request a further extension.
‘OK, thanks. Good work, Bella.’
Then Norman Potting raised his hand. ‘Boss, I’ve had a lot of help today from the mobile phone company, O2. I spoke to Jessie Sheldon’s fiancé early this morning, who told me that’s the supplier her iPhone’s registered with. They provided me half an hour ago with the tracking report on her phone. We may have a result here.’
‘Go on,’ Grace said.
‘The last call she made on it was logged at 6.32 p.m. last night, to a number I’ve identified as belonging to her fiancé, Benedict Greene. He confirms he received a call from her at approximately that time, telling him she was heading home from her kick-boxing lesson. He told her to hurry, because he was picking her up at 7.15 p.m. The phone then remained in standby mode. No further calls were made, but it was plotted, from contact with base stations in the city, moving steadily west from approximately 6.45 p.m. – the time of the abduction. At 7.15 p.m. it stopped moving and has remained static since then.’
‘Where?’ Grace asked.
‘Well,’ the DS said, ‘let me show you.’
He stood up and pointed to an Ordnance Survey map stuck to a whiteboard on the wall. A squiggly blue line ran the entire length of it. There was a red oval drawn on the map, with two red Xs at the top and bottom.
‘The two crosses mark the O2 base stations that Jessie Sheldon’s phone is currently communicating with,’ Potting said. ‘It’s a pretty big area and unfortunately there’s no third base station within range to give us the triangulation which would enable us to pinpoint her position more accurately.’
He pointed at the squiggly blue line. ‘This is the River Adur, which runs up from Shoreham.’
‘Shoreham’s where John Kerridge lives,’ Bella Moy said.
‘Yes, but that’s not helpful to us, since he’s in custody,’ Potting replied in a patronizing tone. Then he continued: ‘There’s open countryside on both sides of the river and Combes Road, a busy main road which runs between these two base stations. There are a few detached private houses, a row of cottages that used to belong to the old cement works, and the cement works itself. It would seem that Jessie Sheldon, or at least her mobile phone, is somewhere inside this circle. But it’s a big area.’
‘We can rule out the cement works,’ said DC Nick Nicholl. ‘I attended there a couple of years ago when I was on Response. It’s got extremely high security – round-the-clock monitoring. If a bird shits, it pings an alarm.’
‘Excellent, Nick,’ Grace said. ‘Thank you. OK. Immediate action. We need to get a ground search of the entire area at first light. A POLSA and as many Uniform, Specials and PCSOs as we can muster. I want the river searched – we’ll put the Specialist Search Unit in there. And we’ll get the helicopter up right away. They can do a floodlight search.’
Grace made some notes, then looked up at his team.
‘According to the Land Registry records, the lock-up is owned by a property company, sir,’ Emma-Jane Boutwood said. ‘I’ll go to their offices first thing in the morning.’
He nodded. Despite round-the-clock surveillance, no one had shown up there. He was not hopeful that anyone would now.
He wasn’t sure what to think.
He turned to the forensic psychologist. ‘Julius, anything?’
Proudfoot nodded. ‘The man who has taken Jessie Sheldon, he’s your man,’ he said emphatically. ‘Not the chap you have in custody.’
‘You sound very certain.’
‘Mark my words.
The right location, the right time, the right person,’ he said, so smugly that Grace wished desperately, for an instant, that he could prove the man wrong.
*
When he returned to his office after the briefing had ended, Grace found a small FedEx package awaiting him.
Curious, he sat down and tore it open. And his evening just got a whole worse.
There was a handwritten note inside, on Police Training College, Bramshill headed paper, and attached to it was a photocopy of an email dated October last year.
The email was addressed to him, from Detective Superintendent Cassian Pewe. It informed him that there were some pages missing from the file on the Shoe Man that Grace had asked him to look through. The same crucial pages on the witness who had seen the van in which Rachael Ryan might have been abducted back in 1997.
The handwritten note said breezily. Found this in my Sent box, Roy! Hope it’s helpful. Perhaps your memory’s not what it was – but hey, don’t worry – happens to all of us! Cheers. Cassian.
After ten minutes of searching through his email system, Grace found the original sitting among hundreds of others that were unread. It had been chaos around that time and Pewe seemed to have taken delight in bombarding him with dozens of e-missives daily. If he had read them all, he’d never have got anything done.
Nonetheless, it was going to leave him with a red face, and one less suspect.
112
Sunday 18 January
Jessie had always been petrified of heights and for that reason at least she was grateful for the darkness. She had no idea where she was, but she had just climbed, one rung at a time, what she figured might be an inspection ladder inside the silo chute.
She had climbed for so long it felt like the ladder reached up to the skies, and she was glad she could not see down. She looked, every few rungs, scared he might already be climbing up after her, but there was no sign – or sound – of him.
Finally at the top she’d felt a railing and a gridded metal floor, and had hauled herself up on to this. Then she had gone head first into a stack of what felt and smelt like old cement bags, and had crawled on top them. It was where she crouched now, peering into the blackness all around her and listening, trying to keep still to stop the bags rustling.
But she could hear nothing beyond the regular sounds of her prison. The regular clangings, clatterings, squeakings and bangings that were all much louder up here than they’d been when she was in the van, as the wind battered broken metal sheeting all around her.
She was thinking hard. What was his plan? Why wasn’t he using the torch?
Was there another way up here?
The only thing that she could see was the luminous dial of her watch. It was just coming up to 9.30 p.m. Sunday night, she figured, it had to be. Over twenty-four hours since she’d been kidnapped. What was happening at home and with Benedict? He’d be isolated from her parents, she thought, wishing desperately now she had introduced them sooner, so they could all be doing something together.
Were the police involved? They must be. She knew her father. He would get every emergency service in the country involved.
How were they? What was her mother thinking? Her father? Benedict?
She heard the distant clatter of a helicopter. That was the second time in the past half-hour she had heard one.
Maybe it was looking for her.
*
He heard the sound of the helicopter again too. A powerful machine, not one of the smaller training ones from the school at nearby Shoreham Airport. And not many helicopters flew at night either. Mainly military, rescue services, air ambulances – and police.
The Sussex Police helicopter was based at Shoreham. If it was theirs that he was hearing, there was no reason to panic. It could be up for all kinds of reasons. The clatter was fading now; it was heading away to the east.
Then he heard a new sound that worried him much more.
A sharp, insistent buzzing. It was coming from the front of the camper. He lowered the binoculars and saw a weak, pulsing light that was also coming from the same place.
‘Oh, shit. No, no, no!’
It was the bitch’s mobile phone, which he had taken from her pocket. He thought he had switched the fucking thing off.
He stumbled up to the front, able to see the light from the phone’s flashing display, seized it, then threw it on the floor in fury and stamped on it, crushing it like a massive beetle.
He stamped on it again. Then again. Then again.
Maddened with pain from his eye, anger at the bitch and anger at himself, he stood shaking. Christ! Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ! How could he have been so stupid?
Mobile phones gave away your location, even when they were only on standby. It would be one of the first things any intelligent police officer would be looking for.
Perhaps the phone companies were not able to access detailed stuff like that on Sundays?
But he knew he could not take the risk. He had to move Jessie Sheldon away from here as quickly as possible. Tonight. During darkness.
Which made it even more imperative to find her and quickly.
She’d made no sound for over an hour. Playing some clever hiding game. She might think she was clever that she had the knife. But he had two far more valuable tools at this moment. The torch and the binoculars.
He’d never had much truck with literature and shit. But there was one line he remembered from somewhere, through his pain: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
That’s what he was now.
He stepped down out of the van on to the concrete floor and raised his binoculars to his face. Hunting.
113
Sunday 18 January
The evening was passing slowly for Roy Grace. He sat in his office, looking at Jessie Sheldon’s family tree, which had been assembled by one of his team members. Her computer and mobile phone records were currently being examined by two members of the overloaded and undermanned High-Tech Crime Unit, who had given up their Sundays for the task.
The only report he’d received so far was that Jessie was very active on social networking sites – something she had in common with the woman who had nearly become a victim of the Shoe Man on Thursday afternoon, Dee Burchmore.
Was that how he followed his victims?
Mandy Thorpe had been active on Facebook and on two other sites as well. But neither Nicola Taylor, who had been raped in the Metropole Hotel, early on New Year’s Day, nor Roxy Pearce, who had been raped in her home in The Droveway, had presences on any social networking sites, not did they Tweet.
It came back to the same thing linking each of these women. They had all recently bought expensive shoes from shops in Brighton. All except Mandy Thorpe.
Despite Dr Proudfoot’s insistence to the contrary, the Detective Superintendent continued to believe that Mandy Thorpe had not been raped by the Shoe Man but by someone else. Perhaps by a copycat. Or possibly the timing was coincidental.
His phone rang. It was DC Michael Foreman from MIR-1.
‘Just had a report in from Hotel 900, who are going down to refuel, sir. So far they have nothing to report, except for two possible anomalies in the old cement works.’
‘Anomalies?’ Grace queried, wondering what the police helicopter crew meant by that.
He knew they had thermal-imaging equipment on board, which could detect humans in pitch darkness or dense fog just from the body heat they gave off. Unfortunately, while good for following villains who were fleeing from a stolen car and trying to hide in woods, or in alleys, it was easily fooled by animals or by anything that retained warmth.
‘Yes, sir. They can’t be sure they’re human – could be foxes or badgers or stray cats or dogs.’
‘OK, get a response unit down there to check it out. Keep me posted.’
*
Half an hour later, DC Foreman rang Grace back. A patrol car had attended the entrance to the old cement works and reported that the place was secure. T
here were ten-foot-high locked gates, topped with razor wire, and extensive surveillance.
‘What kind of surveillance?’ Grace asked.
‘Remote monitoring. A Brighton firm with a good reputation, Sussex Remote Monitoring Services. If there was anything going on in there it would have been picked up by now by them, sir.’
‘I know the name,’ Grace said.
‘The police use them. I think the Sussex House door pads were all installed by them.’
‘Right. OK.’ Like everyone in the city, he knew the cement works. It was one of the big landmarks, heading west, and there were rumours that at some point it was going to be reactivated after nearly two decades in mothballs. It was a vast place, situated in a chalk quarry hewn out of the Downs, comprising a group of buildings, each of them bigger than a football pitch. He wasn’t even sure who the current owners were, but no doubt there would be a sign on the front.
To do a search he’d either have to get their consent or obtain a search warrant. And for an effective search, he’d have to put a big team in there. It would need to be done in daylight.
He made a note on his pad for the morning.
114
Sunday 18 January
‘Jessie!’ he shouted. ‘Phone call for you.’
He sounded so plausible, she almost believed him.
‘Jessie! It’s Benedict! He wants to do a deal with me to let you go! But first he needs to know you are OK. He wants to speak to you!’
She remained silent, trying to think this through. Had Benedict rung, which was highly probable, and the creep answered?
Was this about a ransom?
Benedict didn’t have any money. What kind of deal could he do? And anyhow, this creep was a pervert, the Shoe Man, or whoever he was. He wanted her to masturbate with her shoe. What deal was he talking about? It didn’t make sense.
And she knew, if she shouted, she would give her location away.
Lying on the old cement sacks, aching with cramp and craving water, she realized, for the moment anyway, that despite everything she was safe up here. She’d heard him creeping around the place for nearly two hours, downstairs first, then up on the floor above her, then clambering on to another level that did not sound far below her. At one point he had been so close she could hear him breathing. But mostly he had been silent, just every now and then giving away his position by kicking something, or crunching something underfoot, or with a ping of metal on metal. But he had not switched on his torch.